Chief of Pakistan’s spy service knew where bin Laden was hiding

It has been obvious for years that the Pakistanis have been aiding the same jihadists that the U.S. government has been giving them billions of dollars to fight. The New York Times reported on that at length back in 2008. And now we learn that Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the head of the ISI, the Pakistani government’s spy service, knew the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, and apparently so did many other top officials in the Pakistani government. Those who are surprised by this news probably also think that Islam is a Religion of Peace that has been hijacked by a Tiny Minority of Extremists.

“What Pakistan Knew About Bin Laden,” by Carlotta Gall for the New York Times, March 19 (thanks to Twostellas):

…After our first day of reporting in Quetta, we noticed that an intelligence agent on a motorbike was following us, and everyone we interviewed was visited afterward by ISI agents. We visited a neighborhood called Pashtunabad, “town of the Pashtuns,” a close-knit community of narrow alleys inhabited largely by Afghan refugees who over the years spread up the hillside, building one-story houses from mud and straw. The people are working class: laborers, bus drivers and shopkeepers. The neighborhood is also home to several members of the Taliban, who live in larger houses behind high walls, often next to the mosques and madrasas they run.

The small, untidy entrance on the street to one of those madrasas, the Jamiya Islamiya, conceals the size of the establishment. Inside, a brick-and-concrete building three stories high surrounds a courtyard, and classrooms can accommodate 280 students. At least three of the suicide bombers we were tracing had been students here, and there were reports of more. Senior figures from Pakistani religious parties and provincial-government officials were frequent visitors, and Taliban members would often visit under the cover of darkness in fleets of S.U.V.s.

We requested an interview and were told that a female journalist would not be permitted inside, so I passed some questions to the Pakistani reporter with me, and he and the photographer went in. The deputy head of the madrasa denied that there was any militant training there or any forced recruitment for jihad. “We are educating the students in the Quran, and in the Quran it is written that it is every Muslim’s obligation to wage jihad,” he said. “All we are telling them is what is in the Quran. Then it is up to them to go to jihad.” He ended the conversation. Classes were breaking up, and I could hear a clamor rising as students burst out of their classrooms. Boys poured out of the gates onto the street. They looked spindly, in flapping clothes and prayer caps, as they darted off on their bikes and on foot, chasing one another down the street.

The reporter and the photographer joined me outside. They told me that words of praise were painted across the wall of the inner courtyard for the madrasa’s political patron, a Pakistani religious-party leader, and the Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar. This madrasa, like so many in Pakistan, was a source of the Taliban resurgence that President Hamid Karzai and other Afghan leaders had long been warning about. In this nondescript madrasa in a poor neighborhood of Quetta, one of hundreds throughout the border region, the Taliban and Pakistan’s religious parties were working together to raise an army of militants.

“The madrasas are a cover, a camouflage,” a Pashtun legislator from the area told me. Behind the curtain, hidden in the shadows, lurked the ISI.

The Pakistani government, under President Pervez Musharraf and his intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, was maintaining and protecting the Taliban, both to control the many groups of militants now lodged in the country and to use them as a proxy force to gain leverage over and eventually dominate Afghanistan. The dynamic has played out in ways that can be hard to grasp from the outside, but the strategy that has evolved in Pakistan has been to make a show of cooperation with the American fight against terrorism while covertly abetting and even coordinating Taliban, Kashmiri and foreign Qaeda-linked militants. The linchpin in this two-pronged and at times apparently oppositional strategy is the ISI. It’s through that agency that Pakistan’s true relationship to militant extremism can be discerned — a fact that the United States was slow to appreciate, and later refused to face directly, for fear of setting off a greater confrontation with a powerful Muslim nation.…

Six months later, Pakistan blew up. In the spring of 2007 in Islamabad, female students from a madrasa attached to the Red Mosque were staging a sit-in to protest the demolition of several illegal mosques in the city. The Red Mosque stood at the center of Pakistan’s support for jihad in Afghanistan and throughout the Muslim world. It was founded by a famed jihadi preacher, Maulana Muhammad Abdullah, who was assassinated in 1998, not long after he visited Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda blamed the killing on the Pakistani government at the time.

Abdullah’s sons inherited the mosque and continued its extremist teachings. The eldest, Maulana Abdul Aziz, delivered fiery Friday sermons excoriating Musharraf for his public stance on the fight against terrorism and his dealings with the American government. Despite an earlier reputation as a nonreligious bureaucrat, the younger brother, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, spoke of undergoing a conversion after his father’s death and a meeting with Bin Laden, and by 2007 he would not leave the Red Mosque compound for fear of arrest. He warned that ranks of suicide bombers would retaliate if the government moved against the student protesters.

With such leaders behind them, the students began staging vigilante actions in the streets. They were radical and obsessive, vowing to die rather than give up their protest. The government’s inaction only encouraged them. Several months after the protest began, a group of students made a midnight raid on a massage parlor and abducted several Chinese women.

Remonstrations from China, Pakistan’s most important regional ally, pushed Musharraf to take action. Pakistani Army rangers occupied a school across the street, and police officers and soldiers moved in to surround the mosque on July 3. Armed fighters appeared from the mosque, carrying rockets and assault rifles and taking up sandbagged positions on the mosque walls. Loudspeakers told the students that this was the time for bravery. A female student took over the microphone. “Allah, where is your help?” she asked in a quavering voice. “Destroy the enemies. Tear their hearts apart. Throw fireballs on them.”

Islamabad is a green, tranquil home for civil servants and diplomats, but for several days it resounded with gunfire and explosions. Crowds of worried parents arrived from all over the country to try to retrieve their children. The Red Mosque leaders tried to make the students stay. “They said if the women and others die, the people will take their side,” one father told me, and I realized then how premeditated this all was, how the girls were pawns in their plan to spark a revolution.

A week after the siege began, there was a ferocious battle. Elite Pakistani commandos rappelled from helicopters into the mosque and were raked with machine-gun fire. Perched in the mosque’s minarets and throughout its 75 rooms, the militants fought for 10 hours. They hurled grenades from bunkers and basements, and suicide bombers threw themselves at their attackers. The commandos found female students hiding in a bricked-up space beneath the stairs and led 50 women and girls to safety. Ghazi retreated to a basement in the compound. He died there as the last surviving fighters battled around him.

More than 100 people were killed in the siege, including 10 commandos. The ISI — despite having a long relationship with the mosque and its leaders, as well as two informers inside providing intelligence — played a strangely ineffective role. In a cabinet meeting after the siege, ministers questioned a senior ISI official about the intelligence service’s failure to prevent the militant action. “Who I meet in the evening and what I discuss is on your desk the next morning,” one minister told the official. “How come you did not know what was happening a hundred meters from the ISI headquarters?” The official sat in silence as ministers thumped their desks in a gesture of agreement.

“One hundred percent they knew what was happening,” a former cabinet minister who attended the meeting told me. The ISI allowed the militants to do what they wanted out of sympathy, he said. “The state is not as incompetent as people believe.”…

It took more than three years before the depth of Pakistan’s relationship with Al Qaeda was thrust into the open and the world learned where Bin Laden had been hiding, just a few hundred yards from Pakistan’s top military academy. In May 2011, I drove with a Pakistani colleague down a road in Abbottabad until we were stopped by the Pakistani military. We left our car and walked down a side street, past several walled houses and then along a dirt path until there it was: Osama bin Laden’s house, a three-story concrete building, mostly concealed behind concrete walls as high as 18 feet, topped with rusting strands of barbed wire. This was where Bin Laden hid for nearly six years, and where, 30 hours earlier, Navy SEAL commandos shot him dead in a top-floor bedroom.

After a decade of reporting in Afghanistan and Pakistan and tracking Bin Laden, I was fascinated to see where and how he hid. He had dispensed with the large entourage that surrounded him in Afghanistan. For nearly eight years, he relied on just two trusted Pakistanis, whom American investigators described as a courier and his brother.

People knew that the house was strange, and one local rumor had it that it was a place where wounded Taliban from Waziristan recuperated. I was told this by Musharraf’s former civilian intelligence chief, who had himself been accused of having a hand in hiding Bin Laden in Abbottabad. He denied any involvement, but he did not absolve local intelligence agents, who would have checked the house. All over the country, Pakistan’s various intelligence agencies — the ISI, the Intelligence Bureau and Military Intelligence — keep safe houses for undercover operations. They use residential houses, often in quiet, secure neighborhoods, where they lodge people for interrogation or simply enforced seclusion. Detainees have been questioned by American interrogators in such places and sometimes held for months. Leaders of banned militant groups are often placed in protective custody in this way. Others, including Taliban leaders who took refuge in Pakistan after their fall in Afghanistan in 2001, lived under a looser arrangement, with their own guards but also known to their Pakistani handlers, former Pakistani officials told me. Because of Pakistan’s long practice of covertly supporting militant groups, police officers — who have been warned off or even demoted for getting in the way of ISI operations — have learned to leave such safe houses alone.

The split over how to handle militants is not just between the ISI and the local police; the intelligence service itself is compartmentalized. In 2007, a former senior intelligence official who worked on tracking members of Al Qaeda after Sept. 11 told me that while one part of the ISI was engaged in hunting down militants, another part continued to work with them.

Soon after the Navy SEAL raid on Bin Laden’s house, a Pakistani official told me that the United States had direct evidence that the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, knew of Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. The information came from a senior United States official, and I guessed that the Americans had intercepted a phone call of Pasha’s or one about him in the days after the raid. “He knew of Osama’s whereabouts, yes,” the Pakistani official told me. The official was surprised to learn this and said the Americans were even more so. Pasha had been an energetic opponent of the Taliban and an open and cooperative counterpart for the Americans at the ISI. “Pasha was always their blue-eyed boy,” the official said. But in the weeks and months after the raid, Pasha and the ISI press office strenuously denied that they had any knowledge of Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.
Colleagues at The Times began questioning officials in Washington about which high-ranking officials in Pakistan might also have been aware of Bin Laden’s whereabouts, but everyone suddenly clammed up. It was as if a decision had been made to contain the damage to the relationship between the two governments. “There’s no smoking gun,” officials in the Obama administration began to say.

The haul of handwritten notes, letters, computer files and other information collected from Bin Laden’s house during the raid suggested otherwise, however. It revealed regular correspondence between Bin Laden and a string of militant leaders who must have known he was living in Pakistan, including Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a pro-Kashmiri group that has also been active in Afghanistan, and Mullah Omar of the Taliban. Saeed and Omar are two of the ISI’s most important and loyal militant leaders. Both are protected by the agency. Both cooperate closely with it, restraining their followers from attacking the Pakistani state and coordinating with Pakistan’s greater strategic plans. Any correspondence the two men had with Bin Laden would probably have been known to their ISI handlers.

Bin Laden did not rely only on correspondence. He occasionally traveled to meet aides and fellow militants, one Pakistani security official told me. “Osama was moving around,” he said, adding that he heard so from jihadi sources. “You cannot run a movement without contact with people.” Bin Laden traveled in plain sight, his convoys always knowingly waved through any security checkpoints.…

Comments

Not so simple. It is guaranteed that very senior US government officials and members of administrations going back to even the Reagan years are guilty of aiding this now nuclear-armed terrorist state of Pakistan, and they knew the whole time the implications of what they were doing.

The United States government gave the ISI weapons and funding to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, and a green light to use any strategy they wanted. The ISI formed the Haqqani Network, the backbone of the jihad movement in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the group that spawned Al Qaeda. In reality the Haqqani Network and Al Qaeda are one and the same, and still funded and controlled by the Pakistani ISI (who, in turn, still receive billions of dollars worth of funding every year from America).

Jalaluddin Haqqani became a trusted ally of the Taliban after they seized power in Afghanistan, and was a provincial governor and senior minister within their regime. After 9/11 he was appointed the top military commander of the Taliban, and remains in that position, still sheltered by the Pakistani government. Another famous figure, Mullah Omar, the founder and religious leader of the Taliban, is also still alive and well in Pakistan.

The US government is aware of all this, yet they continually lie to the American people about the true nature of the war in Afghanistan. There is no question that Pakistan is the enemy of the free and civilized world. Pakistan is also a committed ally of Saudi Arabia, another “friend” of ours, and the number one sponsor of jihad terrorism in the world.

If the United States government were to make clear the real story behind the “War on Terror,” it would mean real war with a nuclear armed state, and basically war against the entire Mohammedan world (and OPEC – with all the economic misery that entails). It would also reveal the guilt and corruption of the US government, freely cooperating with the main enemy of the American people. The real casus belli would be for war against the US government by its own citizens.

Instead the US government and the other lying Western leaders send our boys to die in an intentionally unwinnable war against a nonexistent enemy – hence the War on “Terror.”

Who says imam obama is not a sly ole dog? He has sent his buddies the jihadis mega billions straight out of working Americans pockets. The very Americans who the jihadis plan to annihilate. The imam in the W H smiles to himself as he conjures up his god satan.

I always suspected that a large, tall house with unique features, such as security walls, could not be built less than a mile from Pakistan’s West Point without the complete agreement of Pakistan’s military intelligence at the base.

The windows at the third floor permitted messages to be sent visually by Morse code with a flashlight and for OBL (a tall man) to walk around unseen. If a similar house were built near USMA West Point, it would be thoroughly investigated, if not removed.

I wonder if double-agents (working for the US) working in the Paki ISI might not have let the cat out of the bag. Then again, it could’ve been the Paki government cooperated, after being paid under the table by the US, and denies they ever did by necessity.

Two things need to be stated. First, no doubt, the Pakistan spy service know more the it’as willing to let on. After all, they are all Muslims. Second, as for the extermination of heinous murderous fiend Osama bin Laden by the heroic Navy SEAL’s. This proves that it must be true in what they say being “What goes around comes around.” In that when all those people died on September 11, 2001 all bin Laden cound do is sit around a grin. Later when it all came back on him in his small fort in that city in Pakistan he was not longer grining. The report the he look very scared. Moreover, the Bible put the aboving saying in a different way. For the Bible records that Jesus said “all that take the sword shall perish by the sword.” Matthew 26:52. Bin Laden took up the firearm and died by the by the firearm. Futhermore the Bible also teaches “Be not deceived…for what so ever a man soweth , that shall he also reap.” Galatians 6:7. Bin Laden sowed violence and killing and then, inturn, he reaped volence and getting killed. As for the death of bin Laden,it’s good riddence to bad rubbish. Let his name rot in history. As the Bible teaches “the name of wicked shall rot.” Proverbs 10:7. [KJV]

The author had managed to obtain the details about the ISI Ops that Daniel Pearl was killed for in 2002. Bravo! The article contains stuff discussed several times on JihadWatch that was flatly ignored by the Bush’s Administration. The same policies are employed by Obama and Co.

The author opinioned “Soon after the Navy SEAL raid on Bin Laden’s house, a Pakistani official told me that the United States had direct evidence that the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, knew of Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad”. We must have known about the connection long ago – but we kept on trusting them and paying them billions of tax dollars. The only sense in that is we didn’t want a war with Pakistan. The Pakistanies must be cock sure about that therefore they kept on taking huge risks, such as hiding Osama, which paid off big times. The part that I will find challenging, when we leave Afghanstan the Talibans, Al Quada and Pakistanies will start a bloody war against the liberal Afghans that will be bloodier than anything we can imagine. There will be a complete genocide of many tribes who oppose Talibans.

US has been aiding, arming and funding pakistan against India for the last 60+ years. The same US govt. has been sending its soldiers to be killed by the pakistan funded sheltered trained taliban. Nice to see the americans get kicked in the balls.

IF “facethetruth” – with his bizarre line “it’s all America’s fault becuz America hates India and America’s big plan all along has been to destroy India” – is not a Mohammedan in a mask trying a spot of “split the camp”, then he is a fool who has forgotten the maxim that one should never ascribe to malice what is sufficiently explicable by *stupidity*/ ignorance.

It should also be noted that IF he is a mohammedan in a mask – and that is perfectly possible, because think about it …the very last thing the Ummah wants is for *any* of the biggest Infidel Powers (e.g. USA, Russia, China, India) to “wake up” and ally with one another against the Jihad rather than allowing the *Ummah* to play *them* one against the other (as was done, for example, during the Cold War; that was jam for the Mohammedans, they could manipulate the Soviets and the Yanks and suck money from *both*, often at the same time) – then the agenda he is attributing to the *USA* is merely a projection *onto* the USA of *Muslim* ambitions.

The USA did not originate and is not driving the Muslim Ummah’s desire to destroy India any more than it originated or is driving the *rest* of the Global Jihad that has been going for some 1400 years, centuries before the USA came into existence. It has enabled that jihad in past decades simply because its policy makers had their heads in the sand.

I don’t think that the USA has the faintest idea of where the Muslim animus against India comes from (there would be millions of US citizens who have never thought about that particular subject, and don’t know squat about Indian history, especially Indian history between AD 800 and AD 1800) and the USA appears to me to be doing its darndest to *avoid* seeing the *global* Muslim agenda.

Indian non-Muslims who think the USA needs to divorce itself from Islamic Pakistan – which divorce would be good for the USA, as well as for India , and would indeed be a good thing for the whole non-Muslim world – should, instead of obsessing over perceived follies of the past and blaming and complaining, simply focus on the future and concentrate their efforts on – politely, but urgently – fostering general Islamo-awareness among as many American citizens as they can.

India has suffered more from showing tolerance to islam than from anything else in their long history. pakistan is doomed to fail miserably because of their miserable concept of right and wrong. The question is, how many can they drag down with them?

I can see Face_The_Truth’s points, because I don’t want
my tax dollars supporting Pakistain, a islamocracy which deliberately
persecutes everyone non-muslime and supports, facilitates, funds, trains
and equips islam0nazi terrorism against India (and not only in
Kashmir).

Politics makes strange bedfellows? I didn’t make that up and I don’t say I endorse it or like it, especially where islam is concerned.
I will say that islam’s progressive violence is in proportion to their increase in funding and access to modern weapons. I don’t think the early oil men that started this saw it coming

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